1851 -- Czechoslovakia: The Russian anarchist Mikhail BakuninMichael Bakunin, after first being jailed in Prague, is sent today to the Olmütz fortress in Austria, where he is sentenced in May to hang.

Although the death sentence is commuted, Bakunin is chained hand & foot to the prison wall & suffers acutely. Shortly thereafter, he is handed over to the Russians & imprisoned in the dreaded dungeons of the Fortress of Peter & Paul.

1879 -- Germany: Relativity theorist, peace activist Albert Einstein probably lives, more or less, Ulm. Charter union member of the American Federation of Teachers Local 552 at Princeton University in 1938.

"The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects."

In the 1920s, with the names of Sacco & Vanzetti everywhere in the wind, Argentine workers begin a series of general strikes & take to the streets: the American Embassy is attacked & an American flag is burned at a Congressional building.

Badaraco & Alberto Bianchi, members of "The Torch," are blamed & imprisoned. Horacio begins a hunger strike &, for two weeks, all the prisoners held by the Central Department of Police unite in support. Judges order the release of both anarchists.

In 1936, Badaraco went to Spain to fight against Franco's fascist coup. He helped also with the newspapers Working Solidarity & Libertaria Youth.

The tired, gray crowds ebbing & flowing perpetually into the mills had waked & opened their mouths to sing."

— Mary Heaton Vorse

Martial law had been declared by a city owned by big business; workers were arrested, some sent to jail for a year; a young Syrian striker, John Ramy, was bayoneted to death (But, noted Joe Ettor, "Bayonets cannot weave cloth."); a pregnant woman beat so badly by police that she gave birth to a dead baby; & the strike dragged on. But the workers refused to give in.

& when the raises were won, the strikers insisted that the largest increases go to the lowest-paid.

In December 1914 Crane's wife Mary was killed by a train. The couple had been married for 44 years & Crane was devastated by her death. Walter Crane died today, three months later, in Horsham Hospital.

1919 -- France: The 23-year-old Louis-Émile Cottin is sentenced to death. This is commuted to 10 years in prison following a protest campaign organized in the pages of the anarchiste Libertaire. See February 2, 1919. http://www.ephemanar.net/mars14.html#cottin

In October of 1920, Borghi, Malatesta & other anarchists were rounded up on no particular charges. Today the three go on their hunger strike to force court authorities to set a trial date. After nine months in prison on remand, by late July, they are brought for trial to the Assizes in Milan. Malatesta & Borghi offer a vigorous defense of themselves & all those charged are freed.

Fascism is now in the ascendant & the lives of antifascist militants are in the balance. Borghi & Virgilia d'Andrea were continually receiving death threats.

1922 -- Less than a year after beginning work at the Shawmut National Bank, author & founder of the Black Sun Press Harry Crosby resigns following a six-day bender. Source: Geoffrey Wolff, Black Sun (Random House, 1976)http://www.banger.com/banger/crosby/bio.html

In 1962, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC [snick] approached her to register to vote. This got her fired &, that night, a mob shot into her home. Then Hamer began her work in the civil-rights movement as SNCC field secretary. In 1963, an arrest & beating in Winona, Mississippi, left her permanently injured.

Hamer gained national attention as a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the state's all-white delegation to the 1964 National Democratic Convention. She also concentrated on African American self-reliance, including the Freedom Farm Cooperative, which fed 1,500 people.

Why such devotion? Hamer's famous response (now engraved on her headstone):

1978 -- Spain: In the Carabanchel prison, the militant anarquista Agustin Rueda (b.1952), following years of harassment & recent beatings while in jail, dies from his injuries.

Efforts to keep his life from being forgotten have resulted in commemoration gatherings around Spain, including one on the 25th anniversary of his death (March 14, 2003) & another on October 31, 2004 celebrated with recollections, music & poetry.

1981 -- Eric Clapton admitted to United Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota after a serious attack of bleeding ulcers.

1983 -- For the first time in its 23-year history, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Coutries (OPEC) agrees to cut the prices of its crude oil. The decision reflects falling worldwide demand for OPEC products.

Edward Abbey wanted his body transported in the bed of a pickup truck. He wanted to be buried as soon as possible. He wanted no undertakers. No embalming, for Godsake. No coffin. Just an old sleeping bag... Disregard all state laws concerning burial. "I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree," said the message.
As for graveside ceremony: He wanted gunfire & a little music.

"No formal speeches desired, though the deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge. But keep it all simple & brief."

And then a big happy raucous wake. He wanted more music, gay & lively music. He wanted bagpipes.

& meat! Beans & chilis! & corn on the cob. Only a man deeply in love with life & hopelessly soft on humanity would specify, from beyond the grave, that his mourners receive corn on the cob.

"I work best under duress. In fact I only work under duress."

A Prayer for the Traveler

by Edward Abbey

May your trails be crooked, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into & above the clouds, May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples & castles & poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch & monkeys howl, through miasmal & mysterious swamps & down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes & pinnacles & grottos of endless stone, & down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come & go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something more beautiful & more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

When Gay Talese raised the question, "Where are the Italian American Novelists?" on the front page of the March 14, 1993 New York Times Book Review, I believed that he might be bringing, for the first time, national attention to the possibilities that there might be a literary tradition that is distinctly Italian American.

However, hindered by his lack of familiarity with the vast body of literature created by American writers of Italian descent, Talese reduced the experience of Italian-American writers to his own....

In John Fante I found the Italian-American Hemingway. He wanted to be a writer so badly that he sent stories, accompanied by long letters to H. L. Mencken, then one of the leading voices of American literature. Mencken rejected the stories & published the letters.

By 1940, Fante had already published half of his lifetime production of short stories in national magazines ... & had also published two novels & a collection of his stories (Dago Red, 1940).

His four-book saga of Arturo Bandini, of which Wait Until Spring, Bandini! is the first, follows a young Italian Catholic who lights out for California with the intent of escaping his family & its ethnicity by becoming a writer.

All of Fante's work spoke to me with a voice that drowned out all the American literature I had read in school.

1998 -- US: Pi in the Sky?: At the Exploratorium in Frisco, California, mathematicians assemble, as usual, to celebrate pi (3.14159 etc.). One of probably dozens or maybe hundreds of such assemblies worldwide at which people sing songs & recite poetry about pi, have pi trivia quizzes, & eat pi.

(Pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, is a mathematically irrational number, & is thus considered to be a symbol for the mystery of the universe.)

"George W. Bush has undermined our entire campaign platform," complained one staffer, who went on to explain that Cthulhu's presidential campaign slogan has always been, "Why Vote For The Lesser Evil?"

"Ever since Dubya rose to power, the Great Cthulhu is the lesser evil. How could anyone — or anything — compete with his vile policies & sinister agendas?"

After two demonstrators are killed by police, city workers go on strike, followed within a few days by most of the rest of the country.

Deployment of UN troops triggers all-out revolt, which spreads into France & Italy. 10 days later & Western Europe is in insurrectionist hands, though it will take more than three years & no little bloodshed before the last of the global capitalist economy is dismantled, & the period of universal harmony is inaugurated.

"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government & the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this."

— Albert Einstein, "My First Impression of the U.S.A.", 1921

3500 --

"Too many of our poets novelists essayists seem to be taking the side of the State in that ancient & inevitable conflict between the State & the independent individual. This is wrong; that is not the natural place for a writer. If it weren't for all these fools & fanatics running around trying to make things better, then most certainly things would get worse. We need this constant pressure against the barriers to change in order simply to prevent a collapse into total evil. The tension against wrong. To keep things from getting worse."